Autonomous vehicles the focus of partnership between BMW, Intel, and Mobileye

BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye have teamed up to bringautonomous vehiclesinto series production by 2021.

The companies, which represent leaders in automotive, technology,computer vision, and machine learning, share the opinion that automated driving technologies will make travel safer and easier. BMW’s iNEXT model will be the foundation for the BMW Group’s autonomous driving strategy and will set the basis for fleets of fully autonomous vehicles, not just on highways but also in urban environments for the purpose of automated ridesharing solutions.

The goal of the collaboration, according to a press release, is to develop future-proofed solutions that will enable drivers to reach the "so called "eyes off" (level 3) and ultimately the "mind off" (level 4) level transforming the driver’s in-car time into leisure or work time." This level of autonomy would enable the vehicle, on a technical level, to achieve the final stage of traveling "driver off" (level 5) without a human driver inside, which establishes the opportunity for self-driving fleets by 2021.

While BMW lends is automotive expertise to the collaboration, Intel is providing computing power ranging from its Intel Atom to Intel Xeon processors, which deliver up to a total of 100 teraflops of power-efficient performance without having to rewrite code. Mobileye lends its autonomous vehicles expertise, as the company develops software algorithms, system-on-chips, and customer applications based on processing visual information for driver assistance systems.

Mobileye Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO Professor Amnon Shashua commented on the project: "Mobileye is proud to contribute our expertise in sensing, localization and driver policy to enable fully autonomous driving in this cooperation. The processing of sensing, like our capabilities to understand the driving scene through a single camera already, will be deployed on Mobileye’s latest system-on-chip, the EyeQ5, and the collaborative development of fusion algorithms will be deployed on Intel computing platforms. In addition, Mobileye Road Experience Management (REM) technology will provide real-time precise localization and model the driving scene to essentially support fully autonomous driving."

The companies have agreed upon a set of deliverables and milestones to deliver fully autonomous cars based on a common reference architecture. In the near future, the partners will demonstrate an autonomous test drive with a highly automated driving (HAD) prototype. In 2017 the platform will extend to fleets with extended autonomous test drives, according to Intel.

All three companies held a press event on July 1 to discuss their collaboration, which will be made available to multiple car vendors as well as other industries who could benefit from autonomous machines and deep machine learning.

To read statements from both Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and Harald Krüger, Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG,view the full press release here.

Pictured:Intel CEO Brian Krzanich (from left), Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG Harald Krüger and Mobileye Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO Professor Amnon Shashua.

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